Off Sight – Final Year Project 2015

Posted on Fév 1, 2015

Off Sight is currently in development on Unity to valid my final year at Supinfogame school. Basically it is a 3D adventure and experimental game produces with 6 others Supinfogame students and some externs.

My Roles :

The Project :

The most important particularity of our project is that it takes place in a world where people see through a network of cameras (They currently see 4 point of view). This creates a challenge about double navigation to the player : inside cameras’ network and inside environments with his avatar. With that, we use basic elements of adventure games combine with some stealth elements and, of course, we always keep in mind to use our cameras network in a way to make the player solve mostly of the situations.

For the story, an important part in an adventure game, we are based on Film Noir plots with a lot of its stereotypes. To reinforce this reference, our artistic direction is inspired by the 50’s.

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Game Design :

We are two game/level designers in the team and we often switch between these two functions to playtest a lot on our 3C. Our project is a kind of experimentation that’s why we are working in an agile method to iterate a lot on our main problematics. We fixed all the bases together during meetings and through divers tests and playtests.

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Level Designer/Builder :

The level design and level building are very linked to have a great compositin through our cameras. So when I composed a level I also placed graphic elements, some lights and I pay attention to have a pretty and meaning camera angle. We need to communicate a lot with the graphism pole, especially when they take our levels to add decorative props to not hide specific elements.
To construct properly the level design, I have two methods : one for the linear situations and another more focus on navigation challenges or stealth situations.For the first, I create storyboards after to have done researches about photography and famous camera angles of the place and defined the main path to access to the solution.

For the second, I create top-view situations where I indicate the field of view of each cameras. After that, I sort them by their difficulty and I am careful about the introduction of some new mechanics needed and linked into different situations that use them. Then, I match the selected situations to have a first look of the level architecture.

Of course there are always changements when we go on Unity but this phase gives me a clear vision of the main construction and the elements needed.

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Ergonomic Designer :

I had some big iterations on menus and interfaces to find something ergonomic and intuitive. At the beginning, the main interface was too mechanic and rigid that’s why I worked on disposition and transition of the four screens that could be smoother and more relative to a mental disposition. There was also another problem that we saw during playstests : The player was completely lost when he changed his main screen because everything moved. To solve all these problems, I had the idea of « the snail » or « the spiral » (visuals soon).

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+ Some Promotional Elements :

I made some « community management » with our Facebook page : I established the « Groovy Monday », we have to post every week a song, if possible relative to our project.
I also created the base of our document for the team presentation and an ad to our voice actors’ recruitment.